Visions from the New California is a collaboration between the Alliance of Artists Communities and six artists’ residency programs in California. Each site offers its own way of serving its artists-in-residence, though all share a common vision that supporting living artists with time and space to create new work is essential to human progress.
Click on the names below to read more about each program:
18th Street Arts Center
Santa Monica
Djerassi Resident Artists Program
Woodside
Exporatorium
San Francisco
Headlands Center for the Arts
Sausalito
Kala Art Institute
Berkeley
The Sally and Don Lucas Artists Programs at Montalvo Arts Center
Saratoga
Exploratorium
The Exploratorium is a museum of science, art, and human perception, with a mission to create a culture of learning through innovative environments, programs, and tools that help people nurture their curiosity about the world around them. The museum invites visitors, artists, scientists, educators, and exhibit developers to explore the natural world in new ways. From its beginning, the Exploratorium has used the observations made by scientists and artists as a means of expanding the public’s understanding of nature, culture, and natural phenomena.
Exploratorium’s arts program aims to develop new insights and understandings by incorporating the artistic process with other investigative processes; to enhance the role of the museum as a center of cultural investigation; to initiate discourse about the relationships among art, science, human activities, and topics related to multidisciplinary and multicultural activities; and to elucidate, by example, the role that artists can play in modern society.
In the words of Exploratorium founder Dr. Frank Oppenheimer: “Art is included, not just to make things pretty, although it often does so, but primarily because artists make different kinds of discoveries about nature than do physicists or geologists. They also rely on a different basis for decision-making while creating their exhibits. But both artists and scientists help us notice and appreciate things in nature that we had learned to ignore or had never been taught to see. Both art and science are needed to fully understand nature and its effects on people.”